Jan '03 [Home] Short Prose A Small Giant Dies:  The King of Pintupi Valery Oisteanu Nosepeg was a noble savage, a poet, a story teller. He spoke the language of virtually every tribe in western and northern Australia: the Pintupi, the Aranda, Walpiri, Pitjantjara, the Nyaanyatjarra, Papunya and other Northern Territory peoples. He knew by heart eight thousand songs that linked ceremonial rites and sites along various meridians of the Dreamtime tracks.           His main activity was walkabout. He would walk and observe the status of the kangaroo and ostriches, the well-being of the cacti, and the families of wallabys.           Nosepeg was a folkloric genius, a painter, teacher, leader of the crowds in ceremonies and parties or of the massive groups of aborigines used as extras in the movies. He was called every name from the King of Pintupi to the Bush Telegraph. I called him 'Radio-Free Australia,' the true voice of downtrodders from Downunder.           Well-aged and weathered, he would transport his information on tree bark painted with red ochres and white pigment. His maps were drawn on skins that documented the hunting grounds, water holes and caves with ancient paintings. He also knew all the obscure mines for gold and precious stones. They were worth millions, especially to uranium geologists.           Once, when Elizabeth II visited Sydney in 1954, Nosepeg walked up to her and introduced himself. "I am the King of Pintupi!" Her Majesty was quite impressed by his radiant smile. She answered, "I am The Queen of England!" Soon after, a documentary was made about him. He showed his sophisticated paintings and talked about his ancestors. But he never told anyone about the glowing stones in the Healing Caves of Olga's Mountains.           Nosepeg's real name was Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula. He was born in 1925 at Minjilpirri, south of Lake Mackay, to a family of Aborigines, speakers of the Luritja language group. Nosepeg never went to school, and was so frightened the first time he saw a white man that he climbed into a tree to hide. His family moved east, where he worked as a construction laborer, and in his teenage years, he went through a full range of tribal initiation ceremonies.           At the age of 35, he finally moved to the new settlement at Papunya, and in the 1980's, was considered the most successful artist in the colony, earning as much as ten thousand dollars a picture, but he was unable to save any money, and his health was deteriorating due to alcohol abuse. He lost three fingers from his right hand, and his left arm became useless as a result of an untreated fracture. His eyesight weakened, and he continued to drink heavily. He developed a slight stutter, but kept on painting and telling stories.           I met him in 1987 in Sydney's literary pub/club where some writers and journalists gathered to listen to Aborigine story tellers. The evening was not progressing as it should have. The two story tellers took the stage sitting in a cross-legged position, but the noise of the pub did not subside, and their quiet and deep voices did not reach any of us. They were proceeding with their stories, although no one could hear them speak. The music from the front pub drowned out their voices.           Fortunately, my all-access pass issued by the travel magazine for whom I was working at the time brought us to a post-reading party where I finally met face-to-face the famous Nosepeg and photographed him, and even had a drink with these totally charming men. As he arived at the airport that day, he was unsteady on the escalator and started walking backwards and almost fell, laughing and bemused.           Johnny was not only the founding member of the Aboriginal painters group, but also a great story teller. He lived in a settlement called Papunya, in the western Australian desert near Alice Springs, where he was relocated in the early 70's. Under the guidance of a white Australian art teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, the Aboriginal artists abandoned their traditional use of bark and ocras and began using canvas, boards and bright acrylic paints. This new artistic experimentation became very popular in Australia and abroad.           During the 80's, the creation of this thriving school of Aboriginal painters became increasingly prized in the art market. The newspaper accounts and obituary after Nosepeg's death described one of his paintings called "Water Dreaming at Kalipinya" as one of the most representative of this group. This painting was inspired by stories about water, because 1971 was one of the exceptionally heavy rain years in his settlement. It was sold in 1972 for $75, and soon changed hands at a Sotheby's auction in Melbourne for $263,145 (New York Times, 2/26/01).           According to NYU anthropologist Fred Myers, the eighty or so Papunya artists alone regularly sell up to a million dollars worth of paintings a year, while the government estimates total sales of Aboriginal arts and crafts at two hundred million.           The inspirational subject of this art can be found in their belief called the Dreamtime, the moment of creation, when their ancestors ran out into a half-formed world singing the names of the mountains, rivers and hills simultaneously blazing sacred paths, songlines between the elements of landscapes. These songs are passed down from generation to generation within each Aboriginal clan serving both as historical records and as maps guiding them across the desert to the sites of water, food or sacred ritual ceremonies.           Christopher Chippendale, a Cambridge University expert, described Nosepeg's art as "abstract expressionism on the surface, but representational underneath." The conflict between regular analysis and the tendency of Aborigines to conceal the symbolism is prevalent because Aborigines regard as religious secret their paintings, especially to the uninitiated, and Nosepeg and other painters developed a technique of obscuring particularly sacred objects with small dots, giving their works the name, "dot paintings."           In a book published in 1991 titled Art of the Western Desert, Mr. Bardon complains that the reluctance to disclose such sacred knowledge has muted the simplicity and directness of their work, encouraging an ornamental style filled with claustrophobic and oppressive stillness.           At the age of 75, Nosepeg died a penniless alcoholic, survived by his wife, seven daughters and two sons. His paintings hang at the Victoria Arts Center in Melbourne and in New South Wales Gallery in Sydney. [For more information, see Aboriginal Art Online.com—Eds.] ~ . ~ . ~